Church Window Tracery Follow Me Problem

[joshpenwarden1]

Hi,

I have been having a lot of trouble recently with creating church window tracery and, more specifically, with the follow me tool.

It seems to me that sketchup is somewhat limited in this department due to the nature of the curved path that I want to follow.

The object on the left shows what happens with the desired path and the object on the right is the same profile but I have simplified the curve heavily.

As you can see, the simplified curve works fine and sketchup understands the bend correctly but with the more complex curve it does not and it overlaps itself.

Is this a limitation with the program or is there a workaround that I can do to help fix this.

I have attached the file with the two paths/profiles if you wanted to test.
follow-me help.skp (773.0 KB)

Thanks a lot if you can help,

Josh

[slbaumgartner]

The algorithm used by follow me does not do well with short edges at an acute corner, as are happening with your curves. Not at my computer now so I can’t show you, but I’m sure another forum member will chime in soon.

[DaveR]

Follow Me extrudes the profile face perpendicularly to the path segment. When the path turns back on itself as yours does Follow Me ends up creating the folded extrusion as you got. Sometimes it works better to use a different path line. I would model something like this in sections and miter the ends to match the neighboring part. You only need to model half of it anyway. Use Flup/Copy to make the other half.